Webinar: Using your data to drive growth in mobile money services

The Connected Women team recently hosted a webinar on why and how operators and other mobile financial service (MFS) providers should analyse mobile money transactional data with a gender lens. The webinar built upon the findings from the recently published report: ‘Using your data to drive growth in women’s use of mobile money services’.

One of the key takeaways from the webinar was that MFS providers in emerging markets are missing a significant commercial opportunity by overlooking gender in the analysis of their subscriber and transactional data. Female uptake of MFS tends to be significantly lower than male (see our previous blog on the topic), meaning that the majority of the remaining addressable market is female. Despite this fact, many MFS providers have a limited understanding of both the gender composition of their user base, and how usage patterns differ between men and women.

Gender disaggregated data: an untapped resource
For many MFS providers, gender disaggregated data is a major untapped resource which could be used to inform strategic decisions such as:

Pricing

Marketing

Agent network rollout

New product development

Even when gender data is partial or not fully validated, it can be a helpful gauge of relative male and female saturation levels – particularly when combined with further demographic details such as age and location – and can give an indication of how male and female user behaviour differs.

How to approach the analysis
As a first step, simply segmenting the customer base by gender can unlock substantial insight into the scale of the opportunity that female segments represent. Secondly, mapping the customer journey by gender also tends to reveal particular points along this journey where women ‘drop off’ in greater proportions than men. The bottlenecks identified through this process should be where MFS providers focus their efforts, including through follow-up research, targeted marketing and adjustments or additions to the product portfolio to maximise uptake and usage by women.

Promoting gender analysis of mobile money transactional data should also be a priority for other stakeholders with an interest in financial and digital inclusion. The process provides valuable insights into where the benefits of MFS are failing to reach underserved groups, and helps inform commercially viable strategies for how this can be addressed.